The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(112)

Gabriel might have told her to lose it. So, she had not told him.

“How many magicians are there, wandering the Territory, do you think? As many as buffalo?”

“Buffalo don’t feed on each other,” Gabriel said, sliding down out of Steady’s saddle, his gaze still sweeping around them, looking for something, then returning to her. “And magicians seem to breed slower. Far fewer than even a single herd would be my guess. Fewer than all the settlers from Clear Rock to Poll’s Station.”

She had no idea where Poll’s Station was or how many lived between those two spots.

“What is that?” He’d seen the stone in her hand. She turned, opening her palm to show it to him but keeping far back enough that he would not think to take it from her. She felt a stirring possessiveness toward it, or perhaps a wariness: if it was a magician’s making, it was likely dangerous and certainly unpredictable.

“What is it?” he asked again.

She closed her fingers around the heft of the stone again, almost expecting the sigil in her palm to react to it somehow, but nothing happened. Making a decision, she shoved the stocking back into the bag and kept the stone with her.

If it was Farron’s making, maybe it would be useful.

“Isobel.” Gabriel’s voice was stern but curious. “What are you up to?”

“I need to release the angered spirit, and clear the magicians’ medicine from where it is trapped.”

“You couldn’t before.”

“You can’t kill a magician,” she said, agreeing with him. “That was the problem. And, maybe, the answer.”

He took off his hat, running a hand through his hair, then down along the side of his cheek, all signs he was nearing exasperation.

“Isobel.”

“You can’t kill a magician,” she said again, feeling her way through it. “And they . . . they brought the ancient one back. Why and how?”

“Blood medicine,” he said. “Buffalo are powerful.”

“Blood?—and hide to wrap it in. Territory medicine. The buffalo’s medicine and the medicine of this place, sacred ground, all strong. Too strong. And magicians refuse to die down.

“It’s not a haint, Gabriel.” She felt some of her worry, her fear, crack through her voice, and tamped it down again. “That’s why I couldn’t set it to rest. The Territory trapped it half-alive, and now it can’t let go. It doesn’t know how.”

“If you break it free?—the magicians will be able to re-form somewhere else?”

Isobel shrugged; they had seen Farron do something similar, but she did not know enough to say what would be done. The magicians she had dealt with . . .

She remembered little of it, as though something threw a drape over her memories. But she did not need to know how; if she was in truth the devil’s silver, meant to cleanse what had been fouled, then like silver, she did nothing of her own willing but rather what she was.

And if she were something else . . .

“Iz?” He’d seen something change in her face. “What is it?”

“What am I?”



He’d not been conscious of it, but the moment the words came out of her mouth, Gabriel knew that he’d been waiting for that question.

“You’re Isobel of Flood. Isobel of the Devil’s House. Isobel Left Hand. Isobel of names yet to be earned. We’re none of us who we were when we began, Isobel. That’s the point of taking the dust roads.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.” She shifted uneasily, looking down at the stone in her hand as though she’d forgotten she held it, then shoved it into her jacket pocket. “Back in town, those magicians. I stood outside the cabin, I looked at the sigils, and I knew that I couldn’t allow them to go free. Not the way they were, not what they were.” Her eyes wouldn’t settle on him, shifting right, then left, always at an angle, never looking directly at him. Her hands were shoved into her pockets, her body braced as though expecting a blow. “You said . . . you said they were torn apart, bloody. I never touched them, Gabriel, I never even saw them, but I did that. I did that to them, something in me did that to them, and I don’t remember it.”

A breeze touched the tendrils of hair that had escaped her braid, and the tips of her two feathers danced lightly, even as the air cooled the sweat the sun had raised on his skin. He thought a cloud might have passed across the sun, although the sky had been pale blue all day, but he didn’t dare look away from her, even for a second, to check if the weather had changed. It wasn’t storm season; they should be safe enough for now.

“You made a decision, and you carried it out.” He didn’t like what he was about to say, but it was his responsibility to say it. “Sometimes those decisions, those things, will be ugly. That you didn’t do it with your own hands? Doesn’t make it any less your responsibility any more than it wasn’t the judge’s responsibility when he had a man executed, for all that someone else primed the shot.

“So, you take responsibility. Could you, in any conscience, allow the magicians to be released, despite the fact that they had committed no wrong under the Law?”

“No.” There was no hesitation, no doubt in her voice. “The madness, I could feel it in them. They had no control; they didn’t want control, only to consume. They would have gone after anything that fed them—anyone with even the slightest hint of power, and they would have gone after the weakest first.”